Lobby Bar – September 18: Secret Shopping, West of Eden, and the Mos Eisley Underwater Cantina

Lobby Bar –An Embarrassingly Silly Summary of FBT News and Views

Landdown under. Christian Stampfer highlights the top five best cities to enjoy Oktoberfest. Number three on the list is Atlantis. Sure, it may take the lung capacity of a whale to swim to the bottom of the sea, but the seaweed beer down there is delicious.

i stands for impregnable. Paul Riegler delivers the low-down on iOS 9.0 and 9.1 Beta operating systems. One of the new features lets Siri identify its owner based on voice. First fingerprints, now voice –rumor has it that the iPhone 7 will decide whether to unlock or not based on the tone of your voice used in the command

Street smart. Jonathan Spira pokes around the new 34th Street-Hudson Yards subway station in New York City In other news, residents of the Upper East Side were surprised to learn that Manhattan extends west of Eighth Avenue.

Grandpa status. The first Boeing 747-400 aircraft, operated by Delta, has officially retired. The 26-year-old jet plans to move to more temperate Florida, but insisted that it still wants to travel to visit family from time to time.

And all was right with the universe. The TSA ended the practice of putting clueless travelers in its trusted traveler PreCheck lines, where no one has to remove liquids, shoes, laptops, or belts. Frequent flyers were reportedly misty eyed over the prospect of no longer standing behind passengers traveling with everything including a kitchen sink and five gallon bottles of water.

Get off my lawn. To combat an influx of refugees across the continent, Austria, Slovakia, and the Netherlands are implementing temporary border controls. Slovakia has stationed 220 retired officers on its borders who sit in rocking chairs armed with a bulldog and standard garden hose. Hungary, on the other hand, believes that a white picket fence by itself ought to do the trick.

Old times. American Airlines flights were grounded on Thursday due to computer issues. The problem apparently began when American’s 1984 Macintosh computer, which hosts the airline’s core communications system, finally died. The airline has since recovered operations, grudgingly upgrading to a 1995 IBM PC running Netscape Navigator.

The coronavirus is now affecting 104 countries and territories across the globe and many travelers are postponing or cancelling their travel plans as a result.
In some cases, a traveler is holding off because travel to his destination is simply not possible due to quarantine and containment rules; in others, it’s simply a desire not to go somewhere where one might end up with the coronavirus or trapped in a quarantined …

In early May, Warren Buffett divested all of his investment firm’s holdings in the four major U.S. airlines, warning that the “world has changed” for the aviation industry due to the coronavirus crisis. In mid May, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said he saw a bumpy road ahead for the airline industry and predicted that a major carrier would not survive 2020 as a result.
It appears Buffett and Calhoun were on …